Millennium issue: The Turkish empire

Goodbye to the Mamluks

IN AUGUST 1516, on the plain of Marj Dabik in northern Syria, an Ottoman army smashed the forces of the Mamluk sultan of Cairo. The Turkish victory abruptly ended Cairo's 500-year domination of the central lands of Islam. For 400 years, half the Mediterranean and most of the Arab world would henceforth be ruled from Constantinople.

The event stunned contemporaries. Since taking power in Cairo in the 13th century, the Mamluks—a samurai-like regime of mercenary slaves turned masters—had been the mightiest force in the Middle East. It was they who chased the crusaders out of Palestine, they whose superb cavalry fought off Genghis Khan and his Mongol army in 1260.

A later Mongol onslaught, led by Tamerlane, who seized Damascus and then, in 1401, sacked Baghdad, had left Cairo the greatest city in Islam. The Mamluk empire stretched from Alexandria to Aleppo, and far to the south-east beyond Mecca. It monopolised the global spice trade, driving Portuguese venturers around the Cape of Good Hope, and Spanish fleets to the Americas, in search of alternative sources.

The shock was not just that this mighty empire had been beaten. The scale of its defeat was appalling. The 75-year-old Mamluk sultan, Qansuh al-Ghuri, had marched to Syria in style. His magnificent train included 50 camel-loads of gold, and 40 huge illuminated Korans. Besides the chiefs of all Cairo's courts and guilds and dervish orders, he had brought along the caliph, Mutawakkil, latest of the Abbasid family, whose lineage as titular leader of Islam extended back 800 years. For the past 250 of them, Mamluk sultans had used these powerless caliphs as props to legitimise their own rule.

The battle was over in 20 minutes. As it began, the commander of the Mamluk left flank pulled his troops out. This treachery (it earned him an Ottoman governorship) assured the rout of the Mamluks. The sultan was killed, the caliph shipped to Constantinople as a prisoner. The Abbasid line had ended, and Ottoman rulers would now claim its perquisites. The Ottoman sultan, Selim the Grim, on entering Aleppo insultingly dispatched a lame clerk leaning on a cane to take the citadel, where al-Ghuri had parked his camel-loads of treasure.

Within a year the rest of the Mamluk realm had fallen. Within 20 the Ottoman Turks ruled almost all the Arab world, except for distant Morocco and Oman. One battle had transformed an essentially European power into a great Islamic-Mediterranean empire. Selim's successor, Suleiman the Magnificent, was now the richest potentate on earth, Servant of the Holy Places and Commander of the Faithful.

With 480 years of hindsight, the fall of the Mamluks looks less surprising than at the time. The forces at Marj Dabik were not balanced. The 20,000 Mamluks relied on tactics and equipment perfected in the 13th century. The highly trained, horse-mounted archers at the core of their army were no match for Ottoman foot-soldiers wielding new-fangled arquebuses, nor for the Turks' deadly light artillery. The Ottomans' logistics, with separate corps for transport, engineering, food supply and surgery, enabled them to keep 60,000 men in the field.

The Ottomans also represented a new kind of thinking. The regimes they replaced were feudal and venal. In the Mamluk realm, non-Muslims had been tolerated, but only just. The Ottomans had a different vision. Like the British in 19th-century India, they respected local grandees. They also installed a cohesive system of taxes and administration. Customs tariffs were kept low, and foreign merchants welcomed. Enjoying nearly autonomous status, the empire's large religious minorities prospered. For all its later decay, in its early centuries the Ottoman empire was an outstanding success.

Yet the very success of its system sowed the seeds of future trouble. As a loose collection of sanjaks, beyliks, bishoprics and rabbinates, tied to Constantinople with the flimsiest of threads, the peoples of regions like the Balkans and the Middle East got along fairly well. But schisms would eventually arise. Ethnic and religious nationalism, those gloomy fashions of the 20th century, were to make the Ottoman mix explosive.